


wounds remain

by sxldato



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Absent John Winchester, Daddy Issues, Emotionally Repressed Winchesters, Father's Day, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Mild Hurt/Comfort, aka sam's possession trauma and dean taking after his father, hoo boy, it's a joke get it bc he's dead lmao bye
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-19
Updated: 2016-06-19
Packaged: 2018-07-16 01:37:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7246981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sxldato/pseuds/sxldato
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rituals for orphan brothers on Father's Day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wounds remain

**Author's Note:**

> if you're emotionally constipated and you have daddy issues clap your hands  
> /cue for sam and dean to clap very loudly/  
> just a lil thing i wanted to do bc inspiration is rare lately and idk what's going on with me but one thing i DO know is that my hate-fire for john winchester is white-hot and infinite lmao  
> beta'd, and the title is from this quote by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy: _"It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.' I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone."_

It was never an easy day. 

They took the car that was his and drove to the town he had lived in, rode through the quiet and familiar streets that never seemed to change. It was picturesque and untouched by time, but still marred with tragedy. Long delicate tree branches covered in bright June leaves seemed to reach out and tear open the boys' scars.

'Boys' were all they were when they came back to Lawrence. 

There was no grave to visit, but Sam had buried the dog tags with Mary a while ago. So that's where they went. 

Lebanon to Lawrence was nearly a four-hour drive, and they did it with nothing but the radio to shatter the silence into more bearable fragments. 

 _"This is for all the fathers listening in,"_ the radio host said in layers of static.  _"Here's to a great Father's Day."_

An old Cat Stevens song started up, and Dean's hands tightened around the steering wheel. 

Sam began to ask if Dean wanted to change the station, but fell quiet as Dean shook his head. 

Sam wondered if a 'great Father's Day' required having a great father, and if he and Dean should be commemorating John if that were true. Even now it was hard to look back and understand where the responsibility fell. Sam couldn't pick out the moments his anger had been justified and John had really been in the wrong. A small part of him wanted to blame John for everything, but the rest of him insisted that it was all his fault and he should have been more grateful. 

Grateful for what? 

It was worse for Dean, who had only realized John's mistakes after he'd died. Worse because there was less time to heal, to process, to separate himself from what his childhood had shaped him to be. Sam had at least gotten out and found a part of himself. Dean still drove John's car, drank the way John had, shot first and asked questions later the way John had. It had hurt when he first stopped wearing John's leather jacket, too; like he'd been sunburned and lost a layer of skin. 

 _"From the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen,"_ Cat Stevens sang, _"Now there's a way and I know that I have to go away."_

Both the boys' jaws clenched as they fought the stinging sensation behind their eyes. Sam watched the highway fly past through blurred vision, and Dean loosened one of his hands' white-knuckled grip on the wheel to brush off something that had caught in his eyelashes. 

 

They took turns before sitting at Mary's grave together. 

Dean had once said that talking was stupid, especially since neither of them were in the ground, and Sam had told him he didn't need to say anything. Sam never knew whether Dean spoke or remained in silence, and the question lingered ever since they began the tradition.

Dean didn't, in fact, speak to John's dog tags. Not because he didn't trust himself to or because he thought it was pointless, although those were parts of it; it was more that he didn't know what he could possibly say. He almost wished he could go back to being twenty-six and blind to all the wrongs his father had done by him and his baby brother. He wanted that ignorance back. He didn't want to deal with the knowledge that his father hadn't exactly been a great one.

He spoke to his mom instead. He would tell her how confused he was, how sometimes it felt like the whole world was on his shoulders and he wasn't sure he could keep carrying the weight, how other times it felt like all he was capable of was screwing up. He would ask if he'd gotten that from Dad, along with his strong tolerance (dependence) for alcohol, which was starting to freak him out now that he was thirty-seven. He'd tell her he was getting old, that he had a bad knee and he probably needed to do something for his liver to prevent it from taking a swan-dive.

He'd wholeheartedly admit to being lost, and he'd ask for guidance. 

Being able to visit without the Mark of Cain staining him all the way to his bones was a relief. He had clarity again, could mourn properly, could feel everything clean and sharp-- no more dulled emotions, no more feeling through a pane of frosted glass, searching blindly for how to be human. No amount of whiskey or rye could match the numbness the Mark brought and Dean was honestly glad. He didn't want to go there again, to rediscover that place in himself where there was nothing but rage and apathy. 

"I'm scared," he would find himself saying almost every year, found himself saying it to both of them. "I'm scared and I don't know what to do. I can't do this alone." 

A couple minutes later and he'd get up to leave and see Sam waiting for him by the wrought-iron gates of the graveyard, as if both his parents were reminding him,  _you aren't alone._

 

Sam told stories. He would pick apart the last 365 days and choose the pieces John would've wanted to be there for. 

He did leave out certain details, though. Not how the apocalypse started, or the brief loss of his soul, or his yearlong break from hunting; he could talk about those things, he could own up to those things. What he omitted were the moments he couldn't think about yet, the events that were still too fresh and raw in his mind.

He didn't mention Ruby and the demon blood, or the centuries he spent in the Cage, or the multiple brushes with death that hadn't scared him. 

And he certainly wasn't going to bring up Gadreel. Or Lucifer. Talking about them meant reliving what he'd been through and what had been done to him. He'd barely gotten through Lucifer's invasion of the bunker in one emotionally stable piece, and he wasn't going to push his luck. And Gadreel-- 

Sam was afraid John would have sided with Dean on that one, and the thought made him sick to his stomach. He'd dealt with the invalidation of his feelings plenty, enough to know how to handle it and validate them himself, but possession was different. Demon blood was less dirtying than that.

"You wouldn't understand," he murmured. "You wouldn't understand and I can't talk about it, not yet."

Maybe John  _would've_ understood; he'd been possessed by Azazel, after all. But maybe it didn't do to John what it had done to Sam; the systematic breaking down of Sam's sense of self, the victim-blaming and sheer humiliation of it all, the unavoidable word that lingered at the back of his mind and tasted like bile when he tried to say it. 

Sam wasn't about to expose all of that, not to himself. 

But at least this way, with leaving out what he wasn't ready to remember, he could focus on lighter moments. Happy times were few and fleeting, but they were there, and Sam cherished them. They kept him steady, and retelling them helped ease his anxiety and pain for a little while, even if he was just sharing them with an empty grave for a mother he'd never known and a pair of old dog tags. It felt like someone was listening. 

 

Dean got two beers out of the cooler in the backseat and joined Sam afterwards, and the two of them would sit side by side and just exist for a while. Savoring their mere existence often became lost in all the gunfire; it was so easy to get caught up in it all, to count the days by pulse-checks and post-hunt sutures and don't-let-me-go vice grips between brothers. It was so easy that John had done it. Hunting had stopped being an occupation and had started _being_ him. He had become a verb instead of a noun, defined himself by what had happened to him and the revenge he so ruthlessly chased. 

Sam and Dean made a vow that they weren't going to let that happen to one another. 

One of them would always get a little grin and say  _Remember when Dad--_ and that would begin an exchange of bittersweet memories that washed away some of the gloom.

They would both always cry, and they would both always pretend not to notice the other's tears, because that's what they'd always done and it seemed an appropriate way to remember John. They would stifle childlike wails because they had never been children, and saltwater was a symbol of safety, not grief. 

Red-eyed and weak at the knees, they would say their goodbyes for the year and leave the graveyard. 

 

The drive back home was quieter and with a sharper pain than they'd begun with, but they knew enough about reopening old wounds to be accustomed to it. It was routine. They would set the broken bone, sew up the bullet hole, wash it down with some whiskey, and move on. They had to. 

"Do you miss him?" Dean asked. His grip on the wheel is lax. 

"When I think about good moments, yeah," Sam said, doing his best not to feel guilty. 

Dean nodded. "Me too."

Grieving, the Winchester boys had learned, was not the same as missing someone. Because as much as they grieved, as much as they wished it hadn't ended the way it had, as much heartache they felt every time Father's Day rolled around, they had let John stay dead. 

It was easier to love him that way. 

**Author's Note:**

> tbh fuck john winchester  
> (do _not_ fuck john winchester)


End file.
